As the AWS-3 Auction revealed, spectrum is being bought and sold at a premium. That said, operators are looking at novel ways to make the most efficient use possible of their airwaves. Carrier aggregation (CA), a feature of LTE-Advanced, is just one way that wireless operators are hoping to put every last shred of their precious spectrum to use.

No matter how you cut it, if 50 percent (or more) of Internet traffic is going to be delivered over wireless networks, and 79 percent of Internet traffic is going to be streaming video, there is going to be a whole lot of video on our smartphone screens.

The way video is delivered to mobile devices everywhere is about to get turned on its head. Thanks to a feature of LTE-Advanced called Multicast (eMBMS), watching video over a carrier network will be more efficient by leveraging Multicast's point to multi-point approach. Verizon has already demonstrated the technology at last year's Super Bowl in New York, and there's a lot of talk about the possibilities going forward.

During his keynote at Qualcomm’s annual Uplinq developer conference, CEO Steve Mollenkopf said network operators are using the LTE Broadcast SDK in combination with Qualcomm’s middleware in order to build applications. He added that 30-plus developers are working with the SDK today.

Fujitsu has announced the BroadOne GX4000 E-Band Radio for the North American market. Operating in the 70 to 80 GHz band, also known as the E-band, the BroadOne GX4000 Series is the only product of its kind using Fujitsu’s patented Impulse Radio Technology to achieve impressive 3 Gbps transmission rates and ultra-low latency.

T-Mobile today announced that customers who “rescue” subscribers from AT&T, Sprint or Verizon will earn one year of free unlimited data from themselves and their friend. Beginning next week, subscribers who port over their number to T-Mobile and an existing T-Mobile subscriber will earn unlimited LTE or, if they already have unlimited data, a $10 monthly credit for 12 months.

Carrier aggregation is only one component of the emerging LTE-Advanced feature set but it’s received the most attention so far. Maybe that’s because it’s more fun to say than Relay Nodes but more likely it’s because of the phone-melting downlink speeds it’s capable of producing. South Korea’s SK Telecom earlier this year successfully stitched together three LTE bands (one 20 MHz and two 10 MHz) and was able to support speeds up to 300 Mbps.